Followup

I know I said I was done, but I guess I have a few things to add--maybe only one thing for tonight.
Since I'm finally 100% awake, I was reading the site blog for the last three days that I had to miss and learned that the rim of the pot from the midden that I found on my second or third day, is attached to a large base and came out in one piece on Tuesday! There is a good picture of it on the site as well. Granted, I'm a little annoyed that I missed the extraction, but I'm glad the pot was so well preserved and I'm glad I got to feel the finger impressions in the sides.
Also, now that I have access to a real computer, I will try to add some of my pictures soon.

Salt Lake City, USA

My trip is coming to a close, and consequently, my blog will also, but I will fill you in on the last few days.

As I mentioned in my last post, I hurt my back on Wednesday morning. Thursday morning it took me a good 10 minutes of painful struggling to be able to move enough to turn off my alarm clock. It was ridiculous. After than I managed to hobble out to the room next to me and tell my neighbors to inform my professor that I wouldn't be able to make it to site. That was very bothersome, but since it was truly impossible for me, I tried not to be too annoyed by it.(The season of excavation goes another week still, but apparently there is more cleaning up and preping the site for the winter, than there is actual excavations.)
Usually we would have had excavations on Friday as well, but the site director had planned a party for Thursday night, and didn't want to make everyone get up and work with hang-overs.
So, I missed our last day and the party. A few of my friends and my professor came by the hostel between the end of the work day and the party to see if I was well enough to come, but I wasn't mobile enough. The real problem by that time was that after being verticle for about 10-20 minutes, my back would start spasming and I would have to lay down and quickly. I thought about going and laying down on the floor when I needed to, but first of all, I would feel really dumb doing that every 10 minutes, and second, it would take me another 10 minutes to try to get off the floor.
Unfortunately I really don't have many more archaeology-related things to say about my trip, since I missed the last day and party.
Friday I spent the day packing for about 10 minutes and then laying down for about 20. Needless to say, that took the majority of the day. I went out to dinner with a friend that night, and then my professor drove me to Kirkwall where I boarded the ferry, and departed at 11:45pm. I was able to sleep most of the ride, and when we arrived in Aberdeen at 7:00am on Saturday, I took a taxi to my hotel. Since I had not arranged for an early check in, and apparently 7 am was early, (crazy, I know) I couldn't access my suite yet, so I left my luggage in the reception lounge and wandered around Aberdeen, taking frequent rests. I hope to be able to spend more time in that city again. It seemed to be a really neat place. Most of the archetecture I saw on my trip was old and made of stone, but the buildings in Aberdeen were also very large. They were like miniature castles lining the streets. I really enjoyed just sight-seeing.
I ate lunch at a cute little bakery, and then headed back to my hotel where I could get into my "room" finally. It was not what I was expecting... The concierge had me follow him, out of the reception room, out onto the street, then down a side alley, where the hotel key-card gave him access to what seemed to be an apartment building. He led me up several flights of stairs, and then used the key again to go through a door marked with a 32, to what I thought would be my room. Instead this door opened into a small room with 5 other doors, then he gave me a tour of my lodgings. One of the doors opened to a lounge area with two tables, a few easy chairs, a love seat, and a flat screen TV. One opened to a nice bathroom complete with shower, bath-tub, and towel warmer. One opened to a kitchenette that had dishes, cuttlery, a sink, dish-rack, microwave, dish-washer, and refridgerator with a 0.5L of milk. The last door was to the bed-room, which had a king-sized bed with a big fluffy comforter, a vanity, closet, and another flat-screen TV. (The last door was locked and he didn't know what it went to. I suspect it was to connect my lodgings to the one next to me.) The concierge left me gawking at my hotel "room" and he brought my luggage up.
Anyway, that's not what I was expecting. All I really needed was a bed and a toilet, hopefully with a shower, and tht's what I thought I was going to get. I'm not complaining about my suite--it was wonderful--but I felt almost like I was wasting all of that room by just being one person, only there for an evenng.
So I took a long bath. It was the first bath I'd had in a month, and while showers are enough, now and then a good soak is needed to really get all the dirt off, and believe me, I had a lot of dirt.
I went to dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant where I ordered some kind of ravioli. The description had several words I hadn't heard before, but it sounded good, and mentioned several kinds of cheeses (oh, the cheeses in the UK are so much better than our cheeses... It's sad) so I ordered it. I think it had bits of egg-plant in it. Whatever it was, it was good and I was happy with it.
This morning I woke up at 3 to be ready for my previously booked taxi to pick me up at 4. The concierge brought my luggage down again and waited with me for my taxi, which didn't show up. Finally he decided to call the company and they said that as soon as they had one available, it would be here, but currently all of their cars were busy. Apparently people stay our REALLY late on Saturday nights/Sunday mornings there. Also there was a football (soccer) game going on Saturday nght and people were probably out celebrating from that. While I waited for my taxi, several drunken people stumbled past me.  At least they seemed to be friendly drunks. One wished me a happy stay in Aberdeen.
So my Taxi finally came and gave me a ride to the air-port, then when we got there, he ddn't accept credit cards. That was frustrating because I had specifically asked the receptionist to get me a company that would accept credit, and also frustrating because I was several pounds short of the cost of the trip. I had to go into the air-port where there was an ATM to get cash. The lowest ammount it would let me withdraw was 200pounds! all of the other ATMs had increments increasing from 20 but of course not this one.
Oh well. I got him paid and got on all my planes and now I'm in Salt Lake City with a bunch of Scotish pounds which of course I can't exchange because none of the currency exchanges in the airports are open on Sunday... I guess I'll figure that out later. Nothing I can do about it today.

I hope you've all enjoyed hearing about my trip and if all goes according to plan, I'll be returning to the Ness of Brodgar next summer to learn more. I'll probably be coerced into writing a blog next summer as well.

*'Looney Tunes' music and in big, swirly cursive, THE END*

Hostel Plague

Yesterday I didn't write, but I had good cause. We made it to the site, and were rained out within the first hour. Needless to say, not a lot of terribly exciting things happened. When we all got back to the hostel, most of us went back to bed because most of us have a chest cold that won't give up. I was one of the "most".
Yesterday evening we had a trip to Kirkwall where we got to listen to a lecture from a Japanese pottery expert. (He was both Japanese, and an expert of Japanese pottery). He had a difficult time speaking publically and he was difficult to understand at times, but his slides were very detailed and were more like sub-titles rather than bullet points.
He spoke to us primarily on Jomon pottery which was created around 14,000 BC! "Jomon" means "rope-patterns" and it is called this because ropes were used to create extremely detailed designs on the vessels. While the patterns look as though weeks were spent on creating each little groove, it was actually done by rolling rope onto the surface of the clay before it was fired. Sometimes the rope was left straight and then rolled. This resulted in a series of parallel, diagonal lines. Other times it was tied into knots before being impressed upon the clay. This resulted in a kind of celtic-knot looking pattern. The professor even gave each of the viewers a piece of tissue paper and taught us how the ropes were made from fine strips of bark or grass. (I think that was the material he said was used. Some things were unclear because of his accent and translation problems.)
Another thing that was characteristic of this pottery was elaborate coils of clay shaped around the vessels to create even more elaborate works. I suggest looking up pictures of Jomon pottery to get an idea.
I had a very good time at this lecture and was fascinated by some of the examples of restored Jomon and other pottery he showed to us. I kept thinking how interesting it was that the indigenous people of Japan were making these complex works of art 16 thousand years ago, and at the Ness, we are excited over bits of pottery that have had grooves scratched into them 5 thouand years ago.
Today the weather was nice. It was overcast but not terribly windy. The ground was moist and made trowelling much easier than it had been on Monday after our weekend of sun. That was good for me, because I was working in Structure 22 where I was going through a pale yellowish clayey material that may have been used to help waterproof the roof tiles. On Monday, this stuff might as well have been concrete.
Before lunch, I uncovered the bottom of a sturdy, early neolithic wall that we were hoping was still in tact. Right next to me, Jo, the same girl who found the large, fancy piece of pottery in the midden on our second day on site, uncovered the first comlete stone ax head found at the Ness. The stone it is made from is very beautiful and I suggest you check out the NoB site to see a picture of it.
Another good reason to look at the site's site today is that I was the one forced to write the "View from the Trenches" today. I was hoping that I had gone unnoticed by the blog poliece, but apparently they had a check list in the supervisor's hut of which of the Willamette students had blogged, and which ones hadn't. I was the last one. I almost made it.
Writing that was not so fun. I had no idea what to say that would interest the followers of that blog. Everything that happened that day would already be written about. I ended up giving a brief explanation of how I came to be at the Ness this year, and how great I think it is. I also said I hadn't found a task I didn't like, but that was a lie. I wanted to add to the end of that sentence, "except for writing the blog". My professor said I should have, but I think the site director, Nick would have cut it when he edited my entry. As it is, I can't see that he changed a single word. He didn't even change my American way of spelling "favorite".
Tonight our professor got a story teller to come and tell us folk tales of Orkney. It was very neat. Unfortunately I injured my back this morning somehow, and had a lot of trouble sitting while listening to the stories he told. I ended up on my side on the floor, which was fine, until he was leaving and I couldn't get off the floor. I'm going to be so incredibly annoyed if I can't move tomorrow. I'll go and lay in the floor of the house on site if I have to. I'm not missing the last day. (This afternoon I helped in the house where I could sit on the flor with my back up against a wall. I would have been physically unable to trowel anymore.)
I know I said this already, but I woul like to reiterate that the story teller was wonderful. His stories were fun, his voice was deep and animated, and his accent was beautiful. I never caught his name, but I will ask my professor for it, because I believe the story-teller is fairly well known. He travels all around the world telling folk-tales, and I think he has a few books. I asked him for suggestions of other works of literature about folk-lore of this area and of surrounding areas such as Norway. I have a few suggestions to investigate now.

Wind, Wind, Go Away

This morning the sun was shining through our window and I was excited for the nice weather. When we got out in the open, we found out that you could parasail without a boat in this wind. Right now I can hear it gusting around outside.
The section drawing wasn't too terrible in the wind. I finished that up by the first tea break, but after that I was assigned to clean a large area of rubble for a photograph. That's difficult in the first place, but with the wind blowing gusts of dust into your eyes, out of the bucket, and all over the stones, it's really awful. Cleaning has officially become my least favorite job... but I can't complain too much. I found a nice piece of flint while I was cleaning. It wa sitting right on top, so I bagged and tagged it. Usually in cleaning if there is a small find, you leave it in until it can be excavated, but this was too small and loose to leave.
We got the cleaning done, but it wasn't fun, and my eyes were tearing dirt for the next... well, they're still tearing dirt.
After lunch my Willamette group got to learn to do Geophysical Survey. I'm still a little fuzzyon how this specific technique works. Hopefully I will learn more about it tomorrow.
To perform the survey, we charted out a grid on a clear field of 20x40m, and used a large, but apparently fairly simple machine to conduct electricity through the ground and back to the machine. It then maps what and how effectively the stuff under the ground conducts electricity. This is how they figure out what might be down there. I know this is all so scientific that it's difficult to understand. Hopefully I'll be able to describe this process better tomorrow after I've seen the results and had them explained without howling wind obscuring all noise.
We might not be able to work tomorrow though, as the forecast says Thunderstorms with 98% chance for precipitation. I gues we'll see. :)

County Fair and USCB (Unidentified Sea Creature Bits)

Saturday I went to the Kirkwall county fair. It was simply called the "show" but it was surprisingly like the county fairs where I live, except much larger. There were a lot of tourists there, and I get the feeling that is pretty common, so the locals prepare.
We went through looking at chicken, ducks, cows, and ponies. Apparently a Highland cow won best in show, but we didn't see it.
We watched some of the horse competitions and it was really fun to see the riders in their fancy riding gear on little English saddles. I guess I've never seen that in pereson before.
We had heard rumors that there were going to be sheep races and sheep-shearing contests, but we didn't see them if there were. We didn't get there until about noon either.
There were vendors of all sorts. They were selling wool textiles, paintings, bags, clothing, wood-burned art, jewelry, haggis, burgers, alcohol of all shapes and sizes, chips (which we call fries), sweets, candy floss (cotton candy), and so much more.
I bought a pattern to use for either counted-cross-stitch or counted-tapestry, which is a design of Skara Brae. (Hopefully I can finish it before I'm 90 years old. That means I'll have to finish the dragon at least by 80.) The friend I was with found a painting that she really wanted, but she didn't have enough money so we pooled our money and checked to make sure we had enough for the bus tickets home. We did, but just barely.
Most of the people from the fair went to a soccer game after which was between the teams from Ham and Sandwick. We thought that was really funny. Anyway, we were out of money and pretty tired so we didn't go to the game. Instead we went to eat dinner in the same Chinese place that has the best fish-n chips around. While we were standing in line to order, we saw our professor in there waiting for his food. He came and talked to us for a while and we happened to ask him if the restaurant took credit cards. He said no, and we looked at eachother in a kind of "uh-oh" way. He saw it and gave us a 20 pound bill. We would have had to find another place to eat, or gone hungry. It's a good thing that place has good fish'n chips because the Chinese food was iffy at best.
We went to Tesco which is basically the Wal-Mart of Orkney, and bought some groceries for the week, then saw that the next bus back to Stromness and our hostel, wasn't for another two hours, so we went into a Bistro and ordered drinks while we waited. The Bistro was decorated with American things, which was really amusing. They had lisence plates from at least 30 states up on the walls. There was an 8B from Idaho! Somehow it seemed so out of place to see the lisence plates there. I took a picture of the one from Idaho. I felt weird doing it, but I just had to. There was a wooden Indian on the wall with a feather sticking out of his hair, and an old leather base-ball glove next to a wooden bat, under a picture of a taxi.
Today we were going to have a field trip, but it ended up not happening, so my friend and I went to the beach at low tide and combed. We found lots of cool stuff, some of which we brought back to the hostel. We will need to high-grade before we try to pack it though, unless we want to buy an extra suitcase for all of it. We have sea glass, several different kinds of shells, some chips of pottery worn by sand, and two oddities. One is, or at least was, clearly a table knife, but now it is a rusted... thing. We've decided it's from some famous ship wreck. We're not sure what the other thing is.  It's about two inches long, and the shape of a tusk. It's hollow, and white on th inside, but a dark greyish purple on the outside. It might be some kind of really large crab's claw... we're just really not sure. If only I could upload pictures, maybe some of you would know. Anyway, we like it and it's really sturdy so it's coming home with us.
We went to lunch at a pub/restaurant and had fish'n chips. (The fish'n chips are just so good here that we eat them all the time.) It was about four in the afternoon but there was one very drunk older guy at the bar who started singing "Black Velvet Band". The scene was so steriotypical of a Scotish pub, that it felt like an excerpt from a movie.
We only have four more days on site. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

The Wall and the Wait

Today was overcast as usual, and sprinkled occasionally, but not enough to even need a rain-coat. Most of the workers always wear their rain pants, or some form of water-proof trousers because we're up and down, in and out of the dirt/mud all the time. That's fine, as long as you can strip off the muddy layer when you're done for the day.
First thing in the morning, I was instructed to clean a layer near structure 14. (Cleaning is taking the trowel and scraping down a very thin layer of soil, to re-expose the different colors and layers in the ground. It's a tedious process and probably my least favorite, because you're supposed to get all the miniscule clods of dirt off of the surface so that the soil in the ground can be viewed without the crumbs.) The cleaning didn't take very long, and when it was done, my supervisor examined and analyzed the results, then had me take a cut out of some of the newly cleaned space. He was expecting us to find a "robber cut" which is a section of wall where the stones have been removed to construct later structures. Usually the robber cuts are full of random rubble. I found random rubble for about 8cm down, then I found a section of wall that had not been distroyed by neolithic thieves! It was pretty neat. My little section was about 1.2m square, with nice flat stones at the bottom (which are the top of what is left of a wall.) One of these stones is about a 40cm wide by 50 or 60cm long, and only one side of it is exposed.
By lunch time I had cleaned up my section, and made a nice vertical cut in the soil, up from the wall level. This cut had other bits of rock or rubble protruding from it, but if those stones are in between the two sections, you leave them poking out and just square up the soil all around them. So basicly there is a miniature climbing wall on the edge of my section.
After lunch, I was waiting for one of the supervisors to help me, and just before he got to me, they discovered a cache of flint and at least one tool among the cache. Anyway, I couldn't get help until almost the second tea time and even then I didn't get much. I decided while I waited, that today ws probably my least favorite day, just because I wasn't doing anything. That's ok. The day was still good.
About 30 minutes before it was time to leave, I got instructions on how to do a section drawing, which is drawing the climbing wall part of my section, from a horizontal view, looking straight at the face of the wall. The shapes of stones isn't so iportant but the slant and the width is. The section drawing is done by first stringing some twine above the top of the section to be drawn, then making sure that the twine is level. Then a tape measurer is strung up above that. My job was to measure from the taught line to the tops, edges, and bottoms of every rock/surface, so that I could accurately portray them on graph paper at a scale of 1:20. (This would be so much easier if I could just put a picture in here. A picture is worth more than a thousand words in this case. If you go to ingleborougharchaeologygroup.org.uk/masongill.htm and scroll down about 2/3 of the page, there is a simplified version of what I am talking about. It is black and white and under "INTERPRETATION".) I got the basic idea of it before we had to leave, but I'm looking forward to working on it more on Monday.
Well, my work clothes should be clean and dry by now, so I'm going to take care of those, then go to bed and sleep in tomorrow morning. :)

D&D and Counted-Cross Stitch=USEFUL

This morning I finally got to go digging again, and it was amazingly eventful. By the first tea time at 10:30, I had already made 5 small finds, several of which were pretty cool. Two were just small bits of pottery but the third was a large basal sherd, which is what the pottery experts like to examine. I wouldn't have known what it was when I found it if I hadn't taken my sick day in the house cleaning and learning about pottery. Even with that I was a little surprised. It was about the size of a fist, but I could see it was pottery. I asked my supervisor anyway because I had never seen such a thick chunk. He confirmed that it was a basal sherd, "basal" meaning that it had part of the base on it, and "sherd" meaning a piece of pottery. This particular piece had a concave interior with an 'L' shaped exterior, where the base was attached to the wall of the vessel.
The other two pre-tea-time finds were worked stones, which were rounded. Anything we find on site that is round was at least brought to the site, and often worked and used for smoothing, or polishing. All of the natural stone flakes into very flat shapes. That was confusing at first because every sneaky rock looked like a man-made brick or tool. (Gee, I'm such an expert now that I've been at it for a total of three weeks.)
Between tea time and lunch, I found another five small finds, but they were all small pieces of pottery. That was a lot to find in 3.75 hours. It was much better than finding nothing, but there's definately a happy medium of not enough and too many. I was bordering on too many, because I wasn't making much progress into my context (layer of soil).
After lunch, one of my fellow "Willamettes" who had been planning, was moved on to work in the finds hut, and another of them was sent to write the site blog, so I got to take over their planning job.
Planning is drawing the outline of every stone and significant slant or other topography in a particular area. First I had to find the propper E-W line and then put a string taught along the edge of here I needed to plan. Next, I strung a tape measurer along the string, so I could line up with the last drawn square meter of planning.
There is a pre-made planning grid, that is made ofa square wooden frame, and the measurements along the interior of the frame are 1mx1m. Within the frame, there are strings making a grid pattern with squares of 20cmx20cm.
I lined the planning grid up and drew in the stones, and everything onto graphing paper, on a much cmaller scale obviously. I think the 20cm squares from the planning frame were shrunk down into 1cm on the paper. I used a plumb bob to locate where the edges of rocks were, and then counted the grid squares to draw the stone in the correct place. Using the plumb bob prevents visual distrotions because you know where in the square the point is, rather than where you think it is. You can't get directly over the grid to see straight down into the frame.
There were a lot of symbols to use to represent slopes, small finds in-situ, trench edges, and all kinds of things. The only difference between this and making a map for a campaign of Dungeons and Dragons was that here you were recording something real, where as for a D&D camaign, you record what is in your head. There were a few different sybols, since hopefully the trench doesn't contain triggers, traps, or monsters, but other than that, it was the same. Which worked out great for me because my favorite part of creating a D&D campaign is drawing the map.
So far planning is my favorite job. I know that what ever job I have most recntly learned seems to be my favorite, but I think this one will keep first place for a while. I hope I get to do more of it tomorrow, or next week.